Hard to repeat
Bowman: Winning back-to-back Cups ‘tougher to do now’
Scotty Bowman won back-toback Stanley Cups more than once in an illustrious career behind the bench, but the 83-yearold wonders now how feasible it is in today’s NHL.
“Well, it’s not going to happen a lot,” Bowman, a nine-time Cup winner, told the Canadian Press in a recent interview. “It’s tougher to do now – no question about that.”
Not one team has gone backto-back in the salary cap era, with Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins now looking to become the first.
Bowman guided the last repeat winner in Detroit with the Red Wings winning by sweeps in 1997 and 1998. He also helped the Mario Lemieux-led Penguins complete a back-to-back set of championships when he took over for Bob Johnson – who passed away from cancer – for the 1991-92 season and before that, drove the Montreal Canadiens to four straight crowns in the late ’70s.
Bowman believes winning two in a row today is inherently more difficult because of the salary cap and resulting parity of the league.
“Different era, different circumstances evolve around teams and the structures now with the salary cap being probably the major issue,” said Mark Messier, the Hall of Fame centre who won back-to-back Cups two times with the Edmonton Oilers.
Briefly a member of the New York Rangers front office, Messier thought constructing a team good enough to win even once was tough, but keeping that group together under the conditions of the cap, that was almost impossible. The Chicago Blackhawks are a recent example of that with their roster trimmed of supporting talent after Cup wins in 2010, 2013 and 2015.
Pittsburgh managed to keep the guts of last year’s Cup roster intact this year – though they lost No. 1 defenceman Kris Letang to a season-ending injury – but Bowman noted their struggles in building capable units after victory in 2009.
“When you pay three or four guys a lot of money it’s hard to keep your team,” said Bowman, now a senior adviser to the Blackhawks where his son, Stan, works as general manager.
What the Penguins have done, the elder Bowman observed, was develop quality talent internally around Crosby, Letang and Evgeni Malkin, naming Matt Murray as one shining example.
A first-time Cup winner in 2009 and then again last year, Crosby said his appreciation for the challenge had grown.
“I think I had that appreciation coming in, but I think just going through it and understanding how tough it is to win, you need some bounces, you need some luck along the way,” Crosby said.
Had there been a cap in the late ’90s, Bowman’s Red Wings would have had trouble keeping their star-laden group together for multiple seasons. The ’98 Wings had seven future Hall of Famers, including Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan, Igor Larionov and Sergei Federov.
Detroit might have been even better, too, with Vladimir Konstantinov, a Norris trophy finalist whose career tragically came to an end when he was seriously injured in a car crash less than a week after the Wings won the Cup in ’97.